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This letter to the editor
appeared in the June 1999 issue of Scientific American, in
response to Benoit B. Mandelbrot's "A Fractal Walk Down Wall
Street," which appeared in the magazine's February 1999 issue.
For a copy of these issues, please contact Scientific American
at 212.754.0550. We highly recommend a subscription to this
important magazine.
***
I am impelled to point
out that the ideas presented in Benoit B. Mandelbrot's article "A
Multifractal Walk down Wall Street" [February 1999] originated
with Ralph Nelson Elliott, who put them forth more comprehensively
and more accurately with respect to real-world markets in his 1938
book The Wave Principle. Figure 1 shows an illustration from
Elliott's literature depicting the multifractal nature of markets;
figure 2 shows Mandelbrot's exposition. Slight differences in the
specifics pattern used in these diagrams are irrelevant because
Mandelbrot is not arguing a specific form, just multi-fractal self-affinity.
For a detailed response to Mandelbrot's article, please visit http://www.elliottwave.com/response.htm
on the World Wide Web.
Robert R. Prechter
President, Elliott Wave International
Gainesville, GA
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